Apple, a young Jewish writer from New York with a neurotic fear of illness and strange foods, here meets a gentile Austrian shepherd, Hans Breuer, who is a passionate singer and preserver of Yiddish songs. Apple takes up Breuer’s invitation to shepherd with him in the Austrian countryside, where the Holocaust is still alive in tiny detail. As the two “schlep through the Alps,” Apple comes to some shocking discoveries about the Austrians and their Nazi past as well as his own knowledge of the Holocaust (or lack thereof).